DRIVER Dave Newsham is hoping to mark his 100th BTCC race with a top 10 finish at Croft this weekend.

The Scottish racer will be out to banish the pain of the last British Touring Car Championship round at Oulton Park when heavy front end damage resulted in Thurrock-based AmDTuning pulling out of the second race.

But Newsham is confident of challenging for points in all three races at the North Yorkshire track this weekend.

“It’ll be nice to hit 100 races at Croft as I didn’t think it was a mark I would reach when I first joined the BTCC,” said Newsham, who moved into the championship in 2011.

“It’s fantastic for me to be here and hopefully I can celebrate the landmark with a good result to make sure we go into the summer break on a high.”

Newsham heads into the fifth meeting of the campaign in 17th place in the championship standings.

But he has high hopes in North Yorkshire as the Croft circuit is one of his favourites.

“Hopefully the weather will be dry so we can work on our qualifying pace, but Croft is a circuit where it is possible to pass and to work your way forwards through the field,” he added.

“Even if we don’t qualify as high as we want, we can still look to race forwards, and we know we have a car that will allow us to push towards the top ten.”

The damage sustained following the crash last time out at Oulton Park has let the AmD team bring forward upgrades to their Ford Focus car while they were rebuilding it.

They had planned to do these during the summer break but bringing the changes forwards mean that AmD will be running the same specification as the cars used by fellow Ford team Airwaves Racing.

Team boss Shaun Hollamby said: “We learned a lot again at Oulton Park despite what happened, and the aim for this weekend is to have three trouble free race and pick up some points.

“We know we have to try and qualify better, and even though I’m not sure it’ll be the strongest circuit for our car, I’m confident that Dave will be able to get the job done on Sunday and bring home some points before the summer break.”